This meeting was led by Bill Bua and
attended by Chris Magee, Keith Brill, James Hoke, Joe
Sienkiewicz, Geoff DiMego, John Derber, Bill Lapenta,
Joe Carr, and Allan Darling. Steve Silberberg of AWC and Steve
Weiss of SPC attended by remote teleconference.

Checkers:Please pay particular attention to highlighted items.

1. NCO

Chris
McGee of NCO reported that the new RTOFS (Atlantic basin ocean forecast model)
implementation (based on HYCOM) will occur on 16 December 2008. Scheduled for 9
December implementations are the HYSPLIT (dispersion) model upgrade and the
Unified Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis (RTMA). Operational center evaluations of
the new NAM-WRF parallel need to be turned in to NCO by Friday, 5 December 2008
to be included in the briefing to Dr. Uccellini on 12 December. Tentative
implementation date is 12 UTC 16 December 2008.

A
Global Statistical Interpolation (GSI) and post-processing 30-day parallel will
be started as soon as possible, for an implementation of hopefully early
February 2009, if successful. This implementation would be an exception to the
system moratorium being held from Christmas 2008 into April 2009, during IBM
System 6 testing.

A
Short-Range Ensemble Forecast (SREF) System implementation will occur after the
system moratorium ends.Steve W. from
SPC requested a parallel SREF be started during the moratorium; the data would
not be needed real-time necessarily since it will be used to calibrate severe
weather, lightning, and other probabilities based on the new SREF.Allan Darling of NCO said he would work with
SPC to come up with a way to do this (which would just involve making sure data
is available to SPC).

RUC
implementation omitted the TAMDAR data.A fix will be decided on by the principals at NCO, the Mesoscale Branch,
and the Earth Systems Lab in BoulderCO in a future meeting.

As
an aside, we briefly discussed reorganizing the Synergy meeting agenda so that systems,
rather than branches are discussed.A
possibility would be to rotate discussion for different systems every other or
every third month.Bill Bua said he’d
add that to next agenda for discussion.

2. NOTES FROM EMC

2a.
Global Climate and Weather Modeling Branch

No
report this month.

2b.
Mesoscale Modeling Branch

NAM-WRF:

Geoff
DiMego gave further details on the NAM-WRF implementation.The big change is partial cycling of data
assimilation on GFS (using GDAS as the first guess at t-12 hours) and then
ingesting and assimilating subsequently at the mesoscale. The large and
consistent forecast improvements through 84 hours in the NAM-WRF that have
resulted indicate an improved synoptic scale analysis.This complements the improvements resulting
from the addition of gravity wave drag parameterization in the previous
implementation.

No
further implementations will be done in the WRF framework; future changes to
the NAM
will wait until 2010 when the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) has been
successfully implemented.At that time,
4-km nests will be looked into and implemented upon running successfully in
parallel.Fire weather support runs
would be considered for reinstatement subsequently.

RTMA:

The
next implementation will be done in Q4 2009, increasing resolution from 5- to
2.5-km (3-km in AK).For Guam, smart-init will be applied to the GFS at its native
grid resolution to provide a “first guess” for an RTMA as part of a future
implementation.This same smart-init
will provide a downscaled GFS to all WFOs from the same GFS native grid, a better
product that the WFO produced smart-init from the interpolated GFS grids that
the WFOs get through AWIPS.

NGM:

The
NGM will be terminated, as will the Eta-32, since the NAM-MOS will be replacing
the NGM and Eta MOS products.

2c.
Global Ensemble Prediction System

No
report.

2d.
Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (Data Assimilation) System

John
Derber reported further on the implementation brought up in the NCO
section.The next implementation will
include more post-processed products and the inclusion of new satellite
observations from IASI
(an NPOESS source similar to AIRS data), plus improved complex QC inside the
analysis.As previously stated, there
will be a 30-day evaluation period of a parallel run done by the operational
centers starting in early February 2009.

Future
work:In Q4 of 2009, a change to how
NPOESS sounder data is assimilated is to be tested, that will get the starting
GFS forecast analysis closer to the final Global Data Assimilation System
(GDAS) analysis.Preliminarily, this
change seems to affect the number and size of so-called forecast “drop-outs” in
the medium range period.Additional work
will be done on ozone assimilation, 4-D Variational analysis, and situational
background error covariances in the next couple of years.

2e.
ShortRange Ensemble Forecast System

See
NCO above.No report otherwise.

2f.
Marine Modeling and Analysis Branch

No
report.

3. FEEDBACK FROM OPERATIONAL CENTERS/REGIONS

HPC,
OPC, SPC, AWC

No feedback at this time.

4. The next Synergy
Meeting will be held Monday, January 5, 2008, at 12:00 pm EST in Room 209 at
EMC, with remote conference capability.